De Stefani off ered a similar explanation to his students: “Capitalism is the phenomenon of a class that lives on the specifi c productivity of capital, it depends on the right of property and heredity, not on a subtraction at the expense of the workers.” It was, he specifi ed, “a result of savings and conservation, useful actually to the very working classes” (De Stefani 1919, 164).

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 1127